As a new week dawns, the shattered families in Aurora, Colo., face a very different world from the days before the mass shootings at the local cinema, the lethal attack by a lone gunman predicted to impact for years to come.
“It has generational consequences,” said Dr. Mary Ellen O'Toole, among the FBI’s most senior criminal profilers before her retirement in 2009. “All the people watching it; it is like it has changed our emotional DNA.”
Suspect James Holmes, 24, appeared for the first time in court Monday in Arapahoe County, looking wide-eyed and disheveled with dyed red hair. He is being held in isolation and without bond on suspicion of first-degree murder. It is likely he will also face additional counts of aggravated assault and weapons violations.
A reportedly quiet but smart science graduate student, he was arrested by Aurora police in the rear parking lot of the theater minutes after allegedly shooting 12 people and injuring over 50 last Friday.
Mostly in their 20s—although some were children—the victims had been watching the midnight premier of the new Batman movie “Dark Knight Rising” when the gunman appeared in the theater, throwing down two gas canisters before shooting into the audience.
In a televised briefing last Friday, local officials said the gunman had used an assault rifle, a shotgun, two Glock pistols, and carried 6,000 rounds of ammunition. The gunman also wore gear similar to that worn by police SWAT teams, a tactical armored vest, throat protector, groin protector, a gas mask, and a ballistic helmet.
“He didn’t say anything,” Tayler Trujillo, 18, told the Los Angeles Times. “He kicked the door open with his foot and held it open with his foot, and he threw something and it landed in the row in front of me. Then it, like, went off—kind of like a firework—and gas filled the room. All you heard was ‘Get down! Get down!’
“I felt like I couldn’t breathe, my eyes were really super watery,” she said. “And then shots just started being fired, so many, and it stopped for a second, and everybody was, like ‘Go! Go! Go!’ but then he started to fire again and then I had to go back down,” Trujillo said. “Honestly, I just started praying. I thought I was going to die.”
Among the dead are 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, who was watching the movie with her mother, who remains seriously injured, and 51-year-old Gordon W. Cowden, father of four.
Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said nine of the injured are in “bad shape.”
“There are people who have had already numerous surgeries, numerous brain surgeries,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, adding “Some of these victims ... are going to be paralyzed for life.”
The horrific attack now ranks as one of the world’s worst mass shootings. Included in that list is the attack at the Columbine High School in April 1999, when two students opened fire, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others. Columbine is just 17 miles from Aurora.
Lives Changed
Dr. O'Toole, who worked on the Columbine case, said there will be a lot of strong emotions in the Aurora community about how the attack could have happened and why.
“In the days to come, you are going to see a lot of anger directed to everybody, to police, the family, to people who sell guns, society generally—everybody who has the remotest connection to this case,” she said, “I understand that, because people died and lives have been changed generationally forever.”
On Sunday, President Obama traveled to Aurora to meet with survivors and offer solace to families of the victims.
“I had a chance to visit with each family, and most of the conversation was filled with memory,” the President said. “I confessed to them that words are always inadequate in these kinds of situations, but that my main task was to serve as a representative of the entire country and let them know that we are thinking about them at this moment, and will continue to think about them each and every day.”
Dr. Nancy Berns, associate professor of sociology at Iowa’s Drake University, is a specialist in grief, death, and social justice. She says events like the president’s visit were important for the community and their grieving process.
“They don’t have to be high-profile like the president coming,” she said. “But certainly that helps many people have opportunities to come together and remember together, to grieve together.”
Berns said the process people endure in reassembling their lives after such a high-profile and horrific event is complex, and takes time.
People grieve in different ways: some like to talk about it, some do not; some like to be proactive and do something constructive, while others prefer to retreat inwardly.
“The best is to provide opportunities to talk about it and providing them over time is key—if someone is not ready you don’t want to force them, but you want to allow them to come back to it months or even years later,” she said.
Author of a book on closure, Dr. Berns said grief was a natural process and warned that in today’s fast-paced world, it was important not to treat it as a medical problem or to rush people in their process.
To focus on closure does not really describe what people are going to go through, and can often do more harm than good. “It’s not about ending the grief or closure, it is about learning to live with the loss over time,” she said.
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